1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated circuit with associated memory function containing an associated memory such as a content-addressable memory (CAM).
2. Description of Related Art
In routers on networks, associated memories called CAMs are generally used as a routing table describing a media access control (MAC) address. The CAMs are disclosed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,542,391. Search operation peculiar to the CAMs enables high speed search.
However, the CAM is a mere memory having the function of detecting at high speed as to whether an object to be searched is present or not. Therefore, most processing in a router is executed in a control part such as a network processor unit (NPU) and an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The operation share of the control part is extremely large, and too great burden is imposed on the control part. This has caused the problem of having adverse effect on the performance of processing executed by the control part, such as queuing processing in consideration of priority, and accounting processing such as packet logging and statistics creation processing.